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Why are your friends more popular than you? (2013)
- 300bps 10y agoFrom 2013 behind a paywall.
- daveguy 10y agoWeb link circumvents the paywall. Web -> First link in results.
- eloisant 10y agotl;dr people with many friends are overrepresented in social networks (because many people have them as friends) so people who are friends with you have more friends than the average. In other words, everyone is friend with Tom from MySpace so you have a hugely popular friend, but you don't know any loner with no friend (because they're not your friend).
- mkagenius 10y agoor its highly probable that most of your(average person) friends are your friend because they easily accept anyone's friend request and hence have lots of friends
- dsacco 10y agoIn other words, the friendship paradox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
- rdlecler1 10y ago> "Remarkably, the friends became ill about two weeks before the random undergraduates, probably because they were, on average, better connected. With the world only imperfectly prepared for a pandemic, being able to spot trends in this way could be useful." Isn't this just because you have a larger sample (N people * Y friends) than if you are looking at just N people? In which case it's more likely that one's friends will get sick before the randomly selected person. If so what's suprising about that? Does anyone have a link to the original paper?
- pizza 10y agoI think it's saying that peoples' friends are better predictors of illness than just people.
- rdlecler1 10y agoBut isn't that just a function of the larger distribution that gives you more resolution on the tail? I assume I'm missing something here because that seems obvious.
- hkhall 10y agohttp://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0012948 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- yomly 10y agoBecause my friends code in python and JavaScript whilst I code in lisp and try to get everyone to convert to functional programming?
- personjerry 10y agoAh, this is not the quality content I like to see on HN but was written with such... charm?
- adrusi 10y agoIt's the me_irl charm. Edit: before anyone else downvotes me for — what, being superficially too meme-y? — I'll clarify that the purpose of this comment was to point out that the "charm" that personjerry found in the toplevel comment can be found all over the place, and that it's down to a formula. Personally, I'm fond of it regardless.
- castis 10y agoedit: lol nevermind, I always forget the nerd collective doesn't like humor on their precious HN.
- inanutshellus 10y agoDid you stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night?
- rubber_duck 10y agoIs lisp functional programming ?
- fgonzag 10y agoIts most direct influence is lambda calculus itself, yes I'd consider it a functional programming language. It doesn't even support OOP unless you layer CLOS on top of it, and you won't get anywhere if you try imperative programming with it.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoSame reason all the other lines at the supermarket go faster than the one you're in?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- trentmb 10y agoI never made the connection between me being a loser and supermarket line speed before!
- mschwaig 10y agoThere is also a Number Hub video where Hannah Fry talks about this exact phenomenon. This also gets into applications of this result to limiting the spread of diseases. https://youtu.be/Z_15zbgNpHk https://youtu.be/Z_15zbgNpHk
- mhurron 10y agoWhat friends?
- ysavir 10y agoLesson learned: When you set up the equation's terms to get the most dramatic results, you get dramatic results.
- andrewclunn 10y agoYeah, they actually took this one step further than "my friends have more friends than me on average" to "my friends have more friends than me total." As f somebody were going to compare their friendship network with the sum total of all their friends' as a means of comparison. It really took a legitimate mathematical point and distorted it.
- pathikrit 10y agoBasically in a social graph, you are more likely to be in the edge (because there are more vertices in the edge) than in the center (visualize how in a balanced binary tree there are more leaf nodes than inner vertices).
- hexane360 10y agoCoupled with the fact that your friends are likely to be in the center.
- jastr 10y agoReminds me of the surveys that found that men have more partners on average than women. Mathematicians then jump in and show that's not mathematically possible. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/weekinreview/12kolata.html
- Legogris 10y agoConsider that there might be more casual sexual male-male encounters than female-female.
- danw3 10y agoAccording to the linked article the survey was limited to heterosexual individuals.
- nerdponx 10y agohttps://m.mic.com/articles/132129/a-surprising-number-of-straight-men-are-having-sex-with-other-men-says-the-cdc#.81kucOr4i https://m.mic.com/articles/132129/a-surprising-number-of-str...
- jonesetc 10y agoParent slightly misspoke. They asked about heterosexual partners, and not asked heterosexuals about their partners. So homosexual partners would not me included in any counts.
- mamon 10y agoContrary to popular belief sexual orientation is not a matter of "choice", or temporary mood changes, so it's not like phrasing of the question asked in the survey matters at all. 99% of people have either only heterosexual partners or homosexual partners, not both. Even if homosexuals were included in that survey, and asked about "how many heterosexual partners you had", them answering "0" wouldn't matter at all (provided that there were roughly the same number of gays and lesbians surveyed)
- z3t4 10y agoWhen you introduce two people to each other, your own network page-rank increases as both of them get one extra connection.
- amelius 10y agoPage-rank is based on eigenvalues, so it is more complicated. But an interesting question still is: do your friends have, on average, a higher page-rank than you?
- netcan 10y agoRelated effect observed by J Spolsky here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html Tldr: everyone thinks they hire the top 1% of applicants because some applicants spam hundreds of jobs (and never get hired) while others (typically the better ones) apply for very few and get hired immediately. Your 99% rejected pile is the same as other employers' while your 1% accepted pile is unique to you. A more entertaining (and oddly intuitive) variant is the slut paradox: your average partner has been more promiscuous than you.
- komali2 10y agoAs someone who spent yesterday firing off 38 job applications (with personalized cover letters!), this terrifies me.
- strictnein 10y agoCover letters are the worst. Do hiring managers really read them?
- jib 10y agoSome do. I have a colleague who gets really annoyed with bad cover letters when we're interviewing and considers not taking the effort to make it good enough of a reason to reject someone (or at least count is severely against them). Personally I don't care much about your ability to write something that sounds good. So write them and make them good, because you don't know who of us you're interviewing with I guess (metaphorically).
- baus 10y agoWhen I was doing recruiting I absolutely read the cover letters. If you can't describe why I should consider your background, why should I consider hiring you? I think it is an important indicator on how a developer communicates.
- djcapelis 10y ago
- shae 10y agoIsn't this obvious because if you are friends with someone, it's likely they have more friends? A friends graph would end up with many branches and just a few roots, right?
- TempleOSV409 10y agobecause I'm in prison and there is a stupidest retard nigger.
- davidgrenier 10y agoSaw the title, asked my boss: "Why are my friends more popular than me?". The cold hard truth came back quickly: "Cause' you're not very social". Here's your tl;dr.
- chefkoch 10y ago"You have friends?"
- kron 10y agoPeople's social connections are far more concentrated than they seem. Someone that appears to have a great life often is as bored as anyone else. Aside from club promoters, most people's social circle is small. Even rich people who'd you think would be happy, often have mostly transactional unfulfilling relationships. Your job, by far, determines your social circle. And if you happen to work in tech, you likely know a far greater number of intelligence and nice people vs some trendy scene of high finance or entertainment.
- dredmorbius 10y agoSampling bias, or rather, experience/observer bias, is another aspect of this. In 2015 I explored the question of how much user activity there was on Google+. My initial approach was to look at the public posting activity (which is most visible), but a criticism was that there might be some massive amount of private sharing going on (apparently by accounts which had never posted publicly). I did a follow-up analysis looking at the listed followers ("friends" in FB parlance) of publicly inactive and publicly active profiles. The most overwhelming impression was how many profiles -- publicly active or otherwise, had a shockingly small number of followers. The median for publicly inactive profiles: 2. For publicly active ones: 5. The 95%ile: 33.5 for inactives, 69 for actives. This jarred with the experiences of those I was hearing criticism from simply because they were, virtually by definition, extreme outliers. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq Public vs. non-publicly posting profiles summary data Publicly Inactive Followers: n: 88, sum: 561, min: 1, max: 53, mean: 6.375000, median: 2, sd: 10.953730 %-ile: 5: 1, 10: 1, 15: 1, 20: 1, 25: 1, 30: 1, 35: 1, 40: 2, 45: 2, 55: 2, 60: 3, 65: 4, 70: 4.5, 75: 6.5, 80: 7, 85: 10, 90: 19.5, 95: 33.5 Views: n: 88, sum: 638656, min: 265, max: 119442, mean: 7257.454545, median: 1012.5, sd: 17720.702361 %-ile: 5: 298.5, 10: 335, 15: 368.5, 20: 408.5, 25: 477.5, 30: 503, 35: 570.5, 40: 689, 45: 912, 55: 1211, 60: 1340, 65: 2027.5, 70: 2824.5, 75: 5245, 80: 7893.5, 85: 12777.5, 90: 21663, 95: 48144.5 Publicly Active Followers: n: 1890, sum: 125539, min: 1, max: 67855, mean: 66.422751, median: 5, sd: 1579.404405 %-ile: 5: 1, 10: 1, 15: 1, 20: 1, 25: 2, 30: 2, 35: 2, 40: 3, 45: 4, 55: 6, 60: 7, 65: 8, 70: 10, 75: 13, 80: 18, 85: 24, 90: 34, 95: 69 Views: n: 1890, sum: 66647773, min: 252, max: 21088213, mean: 35263.371958, median: 3419.5, sd: 522757.797486 %-ile: 5: 576.5, 10: 855.5, 15: 1076, 20: 1311, 25: 1566.5, 30: 1847.5, 35: 2153.5, 40: 2518, 45: 2947, 55: 4045, 60: 4890, 65: 5982.5, 70: 7645, 75: 10157, 80: 13468, 85: 18576, 90: 27814.5, 95: 54290 More: https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnKkfTNPKR https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/RhnK...
- Snesker 10y agoI don't have any friends.